Semi Secret Software

Scribblenauts [$.99] developer 5th Cell isn't one-and-done with iPhone and iPad. This Thursday, actually, will see the release of its second game, a "micro-platformer" called Run Roo Run. It looks remarkably 5th Cell, and according to exclusive details given to Joystiq, it certainly sounds like a game we'll definitely be getting into. In a nutshell, Run Roo Run is an extremely cutesy and heavily instance-based runner -- think, Canabalt [$.99] but with levels and a kangaroo. The experience is sliced and diced into a series of 420 individual levels that are, also, divided cleanly into chapters that all introduce new obstacles or other new elements, like, items. Each week 5th Cell plans to push 10 more additional levels to the game without the need to update. One really interesting thing that popped up during the Joystiq interview about Run Roo Run was the subject of its inspiration. The initial idea came from Space is Key, an insanely awesome flash game that you've got to play right now.   #1   Today, 06:11 AM Senior Member iPhone 4, iOS 5.x Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: Dreamland, [NZ] Posts: 1,890 Quote: The Game is out in New Zealand. It should be out in US at about 11 PM EST and Europe at around 12 AM UK time. Size of the app is 20.6 MB. Price in NZ is FREE click to enlarge There’s a new Chief of Police in town, and he’s put a ban on dogs, ordering them all to be captured! It’s your task to outrun those pesky cops and evade capture, whilst trying to rescue as many of your doggy pals as you can. Along the way you’ll need to eat food, collect coins, complete missions, and do all you can to avoid capture! You’ll begin playing as Steve the Golden Retriever, collecting coins as you go which can later be spent on various items in the store. Unlock new dogs, collect custom clothing, unleash super power-ups, and call on the mysterious Big Dog for help! Quote: The Game is out in New Zealand. It should be out in US at about 11 PM EST and Europe at around 12 AM UK time. Size of the app is 20.6 MB. Dear game lovers, We are very excited to announce the release of “Tiny Escape”, our new game for iPhone this week end Tiny Escape is an addictive adventurous game, with Read More

OrangePixel have a few iOS platform games under their belt. Back in June, we reviewed Meganoid [$1.99] calling it a quality retro platformer with responsive controls. In September, our review of Stardash [$1.99] highlighted the challenging difficulty levels and Game Boy style presentation. Plus they've released Super Drill Panic [$1.99] and Time Chaos [99¢]. Now, OrangePixel has released their latest action platform game, named simply: INC [$1.99], which is probably my favorite of their releases. INC uses a comic-inspired silhouette art style which immediately captured my interest. Your character is a square with legs and blinking little eyes who runs, jumps and shoots his way through levels that are intentionally pixelated with rough edges. The graphics are 8-bit and chunky, with backgrounds reminiscent of Canabalt [$2.99]. And there's a chip-tune soundtrack, which is always popular in any retro platform game. Another distinctive feature is that when you fire your gun, the word "Ratatat" appears above your weapon, much like a comic description of a sound effect. And if you hold your finger down, the gun automatically fires and many Ratatat's appear. But if you fire too long, the gun overheats and the word "Click!" displays. These little text captions are also used to convey storyline, to show enemies abusing you and to display on-screen hints. INC contains four different worlds, with forty levels in total, including boss fights against various machines.  To complete a level, you find and activate three signal boosters before entering the exit.  Sometimes the boosters are hidden in the terrain and only reveal themselves once shot, so part of the challenge is to locate them, which becomes harder in the later levels. Once a booster is activated, you can see its signal being transmitted. This is another platformer with short levels, like Mos Speedrun [$1.99 / Free] where the goal is to complete each level within a limited timeframe. Although INC's levels are slightly longer and you're actually armed and dangerous. If you beat the target time you'll receive a one-star rating. The other two stars are awarded for killing all enemies and having extra lives remaining after completing the level. Along the way you encounter trigger-happy robots, flying enemy machines, clusters of small aggressive spiders, falling objects to dodge, switches to activate and objects to blast into position. By collecting "Credz" (coins) for points, you can boost your ranking on the OpenFeint and Game Center leaderboards. There's Read More

In last week’s App Smart column, I let the experts lead me toward a handful of great mobile games that I had somehow overlooked in recent years. There were puzzle games, kids’ games and shoot-‘em-up games, but strangely, none of my sources mentioned word games. Let’s remedy that, with a couple of oldies and one new game that will give word lovers reason to call in sick tomorrow. That new game is W.E.L.D.E.R. ($2 on Apple), which is short for Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. It’s wordy. Get it? Players are given a game board of 64 tiles with random letters and blank wild-card tiles and bonus tiles, à la Scrabble. The trick is to create words by swapping letters, but if you use too many swaps, you lose. Start it, and watch the hours fly by. Scrabble players who are great at using one or two letters to build multiword combinations will probably dominate the action. If there’s a flaw in W.E.L.D.E.R., it’s that you can’t play against an opponent in real time. Still, it’s beautifully done, and you will invariably learn a new word or two in every hour you play. (Check out the cute trailer here.) But if head-to-head word search is your thing, you need Wurdle ($2 on Apple), another fiercely addictive game. It may be my favorite mobile game to play with, and against, my children. Wurdle and W.E.L.D.E.R. aren’t on Android, but 7 Little Words (free on Android and Apple for the first 30 puzzles, with additional game packs available for $1 each) is a good alternative. Players receive seven clues to unlock seven mystery words that are scattered in pieces on the game board. It’s a lot more benign than, say, shredding zombies with an M-16, but when you look at what the game does to your workday productivity, it can be pretty gruesome. Read More

Late in 2010, Semi Secret released [$1.99 / HD], a turn-based aerial dog-fighting game based on the Flash game of the same name, which we thought was "tons of fun". Apparently other people liked it too, as it's reportedly been played by 12 million people worldwide (including the online Flash version). Well, the original makers of the game, SpryFox, teamed up with HalfBrick to release a sequel – Steambirds: Survival [Free/HD]. And it's definitely worth checking out (again!) It's a top-down dog-fighting game where you play a pilot with the Allies, fighting against the Axis powers, to protect the United Kingdom. But the cool twist is that it's also turn-based. Your aircraft has an arrow in front of it, which represents the distance and direction it will travel in the next turn. You can bend the line to control your plane's flight-path. When you press the "End Turn" button, your plane moves for a couple of seconds, as do any other planes in the sky, including enemies.  If any enemies appear in front of you, your plane automatically opens fire. It's like a slow-motion dog-fight, which plays out in bursts. Some of the AI controlled planes are on your side, so they'll also shoot at any Axis enemies. In the original version, the missions were pretty basic: The enemies all appeared at once and you had to shoot them all down. Whereas Survival has eight cities to unlock and defend, like Aberdeen, Manchester and Exeter. Each city has eight specific missions to complete, such as  "Down three planes", "Survive 5 waves (of attack)" or "take down 8 bombinos within 5 waves". Instead of one wave of enemies, there's now multiple waves, making the missions feel more much varied and interesting. In fact, there's much more content in this release overall, with 64 missions and eight planes now and a further 56 missions and seven additional planes to be released soon. Once you've completed a mission you can either return to base to play the next mission, or continue playing for glory and to earn extra copper (money). You'll score more copper by taking out more challenging enemies. Once you've beaten a mission, you can't replay it, although after beating the first seven missions for a city a much harder eighth "infinite" mission is unlocked. You keep playing this eighth mission until the enemy eventually shoots you down; and you can replay it too, Read More

On this week’s bonus edition of The TouchArcade Show, a crew of three -- count ‘em! -- chat with indie games visionary and creator of Canabalt [$2.99], Semi Secret Software's Adam Saltsman. The conversation kicks off with a light discussion of Adam’s oddly elaborate sandwich and then into other much more hard-hitting topics such as the themes and ideas that went into, ultimately, the creation of Canabalt, what Adam offers the indie games community, and several of his other games including Zits & Giggles and Wurdle [$1.99], one of the first iOS word games to hit the App Store. You can download this episode directly or stream it via the links provided below or, hey, you can even subscribe to our fair podcast via iTunes or the Zune Marketplace. This is an awesome and honest discussion that I think you’ll like. We’ll be back, of course, with another bonus episode next week with another developer chat. Also, prepare yourself for another flagship podcast this Friday. Yay! If you want to get in touch with us and get your name in the show the e-mail is podcast@toucharcade.com. You can also hit us up on the Twitter and the Facebook if social media is your thing. Interstitial for this episode is all via Overclock Remix’s Daniel Baranowsky, the man who composed the iconic song for Canabalt. A snippet of Jim Guthrie’s Audio Pepsi opens and closes the ‘cast. Here’s a track list of what we used: Hi! I'm from Dispel Games, a new startup company that commit to make games that will dispel you from the real world. Defender Corp is a game that marry the sliding to left and right game control element of the space invader with the castle defend strategy of tower defend type game while taking advantage of accelerometer and touch screen to create a unique gameplay experience that has not be found anywhere before. Do hope everyone here will give this game a go and would like to know all of your reply about this game! Thanks for your time!   #3   Today, 06:57 PM Senior Member Join Date: Feb 2009 Posts: 2,155 well the first one is if you managed to get past level 15, which is where it crashed for most people, which was ignored and never updated. Which i admit does not ecourage me to buy this Dolphin Ride FREE - a tryout version of Read More

...last time we gave away a massive amount of promo codes on our Facebook page it was a huge hit, but people had two main complaints: Codes were snatched almost instantly (Argh!! Lurkers!!) and we just did it with no warning. Since I aim to please, I think I've hatched a plan, nay, a scheme to distribute codes in a way that shouldn't necessarily reward those who are the fastest at copying and past... Read More

Did you find yourself salivating at the massive list of EA sales only to discover that the balance of your iTunes account is 32¢ short of actually being able to buy anything? Well, the weekend is saved thanks to three generous developers! geoDefense, Free - I have absolutely nothing but good things to say about the geoDefense series of games. If you even are vaguely interested in tower defense games, you need to download this one right away. If you like it, make sure to also snag geoDefense Swarm [$1.99 / Lite] Gravity Hook HD, Free - From the makers of Canabalt [$2.99], here's a game that asks you to climb high instead of run far. You can also play the free Flash version online, but I'm not sure why you'd bother when this is also free! Zentomino, Free - Little White Bear Studios is a puzzler with gameplay that's simple enough for kids, while still being capable of stumping adults. 200 levels in all are included, which should keep you busy for hours, days, or potentially even longer. If you like this one, give TanZen [99¢ / Lite a try as well. (Note: If this isn't showing up for free for you yet, give it a bit.) Hi! I'm from Dispel Games, a new startup company that commit to make games that will dispel you from the real world. Defender Corp is a game that marry the sliding to left and right game control element of the space invader with the castle defend strategy of tower defend type game while taking advantage of accelerometer and touch screen to create a unique gameplay experience that has not be found anywhere before. Do hope everyone here will give this game a go and would like to know all of your reply about this game! Thanks for your time!   #3   Today, 06:57 PM Senior Member Join Date: Feb 2009 Posts: 2,155 well the first one is if you managed to get past level 15, which is where it crashed for most people, which was ignored and never updated. Which i admit does not ecourage me to buy this Dolphin Ride FREE - a tryout version of Dolphin Ride is COMING SOON to the App store! *** Help the little dolphin to take his friends safely home. Avoid obstacles and swim as far as you can. Dolphin Ride is a fun, happy Read More

posted by Jonathan Kizer on Saturday, May 21, 2011 at 4:36 am.   It’s not every year that a relatively small niche of a growing industry gets featured in a prominent book of world records, but that’s exactly what has happened. In this year’s version of the Guinness Book of World Records: Gamer Edition, many developers of popular games for iOS, and for more traditional platforms like the PC, have been immortalized in the pages of a book. The following iOS games are highlighted: The following are also given honors, but don’t exist on iOS (yet): The games that were mentioned were all considered “experiments,” given that they were developed on a much tighter budget, and often by first-time coders with a vision. Take Minecraft, for example: the game is now a phenomenom, but who could have guessed that a game with 8-bit, square graphics could thrive among today’s games like Uncharted, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Halo: Reach? But it obviously has, going from nothing to being featured in a book of world records. It’s also interesting considering the part that “app stores” have helped in popularizing indie games, as well as making them possible. Some, like Canabalt, have been offered on Apple’s own App Store for iOS with great success (many other indie titles have as well). Others, like Audiosurf, have been offered up on what many consider to be the premier digital distribution client for games on laptops and desktops: Steam by Valve, which has a whole category dedicated to the indie world. It seems like the massive audience offered by these marketplaces transcend the minimal costs of being there, as indie developers do make money. Other games, like Minecraft, are able to reach popularity without the help of a storefront. Minecraft, developed by Markus Persson, has an entirely different take towards it. The game is currently in beta, and has been for a long while. However, it’s also for sale at a discounted price. It works like this: people buy the current game as-is for a cheaper price. Future updates are included, as well as the final version (whenever that is). The current version, though still in beta, is more than playable. Customers know this, and buy the game. Either way, it’s great to see these types of experimental games thinking outside the box also being a commercial success. This wasn’t the case even a few years Read More

Late last year, the developer who created popular indie game Canabalt released the game's source code under an MIT open source license. This license lets other developers use the underlying game engine to power their own games for either private or commercial distribution. While the underlying engine is free to use, the Canabalt developer clearly states other developers cannot "distribute or redistribute our game code, art or sounds." Unfortunately, PLD Soft may have violated this open source license by taking the source code, repackaging it with minimal changes and submitting it to the App Store as an app called Free Running. Apple approved this Canabalt clone, and it is now available for free. While it may prevent the entry of harmful and poorly written applications into the App Store, Apple's approval process is not perfect. Just last week, a Mario clone made its way into the App Store, and now we see the debut of a Canabalt clone. The Mario clone had a limited lifespan and was pulled promptly from the App Store, we will wait and see if Free Running meets the same fate. Read More

Posted 02/15/2011 at 9:07am | by Andrew Groen Neverending one-button platformers have become extremely popular on the iPhone over the past year. Games like Canabalt [iTunes Link] proved you didn't need complicated design to engage players for hours. Now, indie developer Honeyslug is taking that formula a step further with their new release Poto and Cabenga. You control not one but two characters with a single button. The game stars two characters simultaneously (who we can only assume are named Poto and his horse Cabenga, or perhaps the other way around.) As the game begins, the two are riding together through the desert, until Poto is eaten by a giant flying creature! The screen then splits as the symbiotic Poto and Cabenga are controlled with just one button. Poto is trying to make it out of the creature's belly, while Cabenga rushes below to keep pace so the two aren't separated. The game was originally created last year for the Gamma 4 one-button game design challenge, and was honored as one of the contest's six winners. Poto and Cabenga releases Thursday for 99 cents. Or if you can't spare 99 cents you can head over to their website where it's currently available as a free flash game. Tags: Read More